Court Silences CIA Operative Despite Yellowcake Scandal

Valerie Plame Wilson cannot publicize details of her work as a CIA operative, even though a government official already outed her as an agent in an attempt to discredit her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, a federal appeals court says.

Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, Joseph Wilson, in 2006

Plame Wilson, who served as chief of the unit responsible for weapons proliferation issues related to Iraq, argued that confidentiality agreements she signed to win her employment more than two decades ago should be nullified. The CIA has prohibited her from discussing her pre-2002 employment in her 2007 memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.

She maintained the confidentiality agreement should be set aside because government officials leaked to the press that she was an agent. Also, as part of a battle to obtain retirement benefits, her 20-year-employment status became part of the congressional record.

Given that she has been revealed as a operative, the First Amendment allows her to sidestep her confidentiality agreement, she argued.

But the appeals court, in siding with a lower court and a CIA review board prohibiting her from describing her work prior to 2002, said the nation’s national security could be compromised (.pdf) by the disclosures she’d planned in her book. In addition, the court said, it was irrelevant whether it was widely known that she was working under cover.

“That Ms. Wilson’s service may have been cut short by the failure of others to respect the classified status of her employment may well have warranted investigation. But these circumstances do not absolve Ms. Wilson of her own secrecy obligations,” a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.

In a concurring opinion, Judge Robert Katzmann agreed that the court’s hands were tied. But Katzmann suggested that it made no sense for the CIA to claim national security.

The CIA’s position, he wrote, “blinks reality in light of the unique facts of this case and the policies behind the doctrines at issue here.”

Nearly three years after the so-called “Yellowcake” scandal, Plame Wilson resigned in 2006 after concluding she was of little value to the CIA, given that her identity had been leaked to Novak.

Before the press outed her, Plame Wilson’s husband published an op-ed in The New York Times discrediting President George W. Bush’s assertion that Saddam Hussein sought significant quantities of uranium yellowcake from Africa. The husband was the former chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and had previously investigated the uranium allegations at the behest of the CIA.

In response to the column, however, the conservative columnist Robert Novak revealed Plame Wilson’s identity, writing that it was the wife’s idea to have sent her husband to Niger to investigate Iraq’s alleged uranium purchases.

According to a grand jury investigation in Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff — I. Lewis Libby — Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, and Libby leaked Plame Wilson’s identity to members of the press. President Bush commuted Libby’s 30-month sentence following his conviction of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements

To assist in Libby’s prosecution, the government officially disclosed that Plame Wilson worked for the CIA from at least 2002.